


Forms of Flattery

by twentythird



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-27
Updated: 2013-09-27
Packaged: 2017-12-27 18:05:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/981993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twentythird/pseuds/twentythird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where they show up at the Halloween party accidentally dressed as each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forms of Flattery

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to my 6 A.M. brain, which thinks it’s okay to come up with this shit and then skip away, cackling. Also, let’s say this is Halloween of 2024, two and a half months before “Stop the clock!”

.  
.  
.

_ABSTRACT:  
Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, Ph. D, decides that in order to 1) humor his colleagues, 2) fulfill the terms of a deal negotiated over scotch after a particularly brutal October Tuesday, and 3) gain access to a second chalkboard that Dr. Steven Crane, [2] Ph. Ds, is holding hostage down in engineering, he [Dr. Gottlieb] will actually attend the annual Halloween party, costumed as his self-obsessed sociopathic colleague, Dr. Newton Geizler, [6, for fuck’s _ sake _] Ph. Ds, he of the tattoos, he of the maddening face who will not stay on his own side of the lab, who more often than not smells like the distinctly metallic midnight-blue blood of whatever specimen he currently is up to his elbows within. Until this time, the emotional and mental limits of Dr. Gottlieb have not been tested in such a way, largely due to his inability to tolerate such petty buffoonery. The purpose of this experiment is to determine whether Dr. Gottlieb has the rocks to go through with it [the aforementioned costumed buffoonery], and therefore, whether or not the addition of a second chalkboard to his lab—a mobile one with wheels, black on one side, grad-school-green on the other, utter perfection—is worth his acting like an infantile pillock._

 

The Hong Kong Shatterdome has exactly two official gatherings a year: Halloween, and a winter holiday event halfway through December. Rumor had it that the Marshall paid for the saké at each party himself; the PPDC was a government group, after all, and even the funding of every government wasn’t enough to sponsor _that_ kind of chicanery.

As October wound to a close, it seemed like everyone could do with more saké than usual.

There was a desperation floating through the Shatterdome that everyone could feel and no one could touch. A glance around this year's Halloween party saw it manifested everywhere; the costumes were crazier, the drinks stronger, the laughs louder. Everyone from the janitors to the LOCCENT operators were looking forward to letting loose, to forget that they were about to be the last Shatterdome in the Pacific, to forget the newsreels of Jaeger after Jaegar torn apart in combat.

Things, to say the least, had been better.

And so Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, resisting the urge to adjust himself inside his suffocating black jeans, mein _gott_ , found himself in the middle of the crowd. Heady house music thumped through the laser-punctuated dark in hilarious contrast to the exuberant costumes around him, including those of his colleagues. Steve had gone full-blown Ziggy Stardust, his face full of lightning, while Aditi positively dripped with zombie prosthetics. Hermann swirled his saké in one hand as they stood in a triangle amid a hundred others doing the same, all packed together as the lights swept over them.

“Come _on_.” Aditi stood on her tip-toes to look around, and nearly lurched forward. She and Steve knocked back some of the older, fumier saké ten minutes ago, and it was starting to show. “Where’s Geizler? He has to see how bad Steve fucked up Yamarashi.”

Steve rolled his eyes, called over the noise, “I’m an engineer, not an artist. And we only had four colors. And that dinky-ass group shot for a reference. That was from forever—five? Three years ago.”

Hermann knew the photo, not only because it had perched next to him for an hour earlier while Steve and Aditi helped Sharpie up Hermann’s arms. Nine of them had started this venture at the K-Science / Jaeger Engineering lab in Tokyo, Steve Crane and Aditi Patel included. Now the K-Science gang was down to three.

Well, two, after next week. Hermann glanced at Aditi, said, “Have you told Newt yet?”

“Nah.” Aditi sipped her saké, guilt flashing over her gory face. “I’ll tell him tonight, I guess.”

They studied their drinks. “Fired” wasn’t the word for it. “We’re downsizing” was closer. “Screw you, PPDC, what have you done for us lately?” was closest. After next week, Hermann and Newton would be the last two K-Scientists officially in the employ of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps. The last soldiers on this particular battlefront.

“Well.” Hermann tried to smile, lifted his color-splashed arms. “I think you both did excellent work here. Honestly, I don’t know how he can stand looking at them all day. Or how any blood gets to his brain, wearing pants like these.” A glance in a mirror earlier had been enough to totally unnerve Hermann. The pants made a mockery of his legs, as did the shoes, while the slim-cut white shirt was one he only ever wore under a sweater. Steve loaned him the tie. And Hermann’s hair, _no_ ; it looked as though he’d just woken up in a dormitory, or fallen down a flight of stairs.

“Shut up, the pants are killer,” Aditi said, and swayed again, looped an arm around Steve’s neck. “Newt’s gonna _flip_. Just wait.”

“You mean he’ll ‘flip’ because of your tattoo handiwork,” Hermann clarified, mouth in a thin line. Steve and Aditi had teased in this territory before, and now they both stared at him, doe-eyed.

“Yeah,” said Steve, a short nod. “Yeah, the tats. Totally.”

“Mmm,” Aditi agreed into her drink.

That was the worst part, standing here dressed like the colleague whom, as often as Hermann imagined shutting him up via a good pummeling, oftener imagined shutting him up by grabbing the lapels of his jacket, pulling him in. _He’ll know,_ Hermann thought in a desperate mantra, _he’ll know. I've made it obvious in this hubristic quest for another chalkboard, and I will never, ever hear the end of it._

There was bark of laughter from behind him, followed by more of it. For a moment Hermann blocked it out—when was laughter in his peripheral anything new?—but then he heard it.

The mimicked accent, though uncharacteristically high-pitched, the appallingly-rolled—“Kindly _rrrrr_ emove that detritus to _your_ side of the lab, Doctor Geizler, before I—“

And the voice stopped.

Aditi and Steve were looking past Hermann, stunned, Aditi pale under her smears of fake blood, Steve’s jaw was somewhere around his knees. _What now,_ Hermann thought, the rest of the crowd going silent around him, _what bloody now—_

He turned around.

A shorter, wilder-eyed version of himself gaped back. Newton wore a bulky cable-knit sweater in a nauseating shade of puce, oatmeal shirt underneath buttoned to the throat, tweed trousers, thick-rimmed glasses on a floral lanyard around his neck. Hair combed flat and downright centurion. Two-toned shoes he’d scored from god knows where. A wooden cane so gnarly it looked like it would start growing around his hand.

There was a small crowd around them now, some laughing, some utterly unsure what to do as the two scientists stared each other down.

“ _You guys coordinate_?” someone yelled, and Hermann, still aghast, managed to shake his head no. Never. Not in a hundred years.

“I swear,” Aditi was saying at his elbow, over the music, shaking with laughter, “I _swear_ I had no ide—oh my _god_ , Steve, where is your camera—“

“ _Nehw_.” Newt recovered first, lifted his cane, jabbed it at Steve, pursed his lips. “ _Dehwn’t_ take flash photography in this lab, Doctor Crane; you will only irritate me past the point of reason, as if _this_ —“ He swung his cane into Hermann’s personal space, right above his sternum, without landing. “—pitiful excuse for a scholar hasn’t already done so. Tell me, you w _rrr_ etched creature, when you got those tattoos, did you ever consider the plight of everyone who’s forced to look at them on a daily basis?”

Hermann could’ve choked. A hundred emotions were tightening in his chest; he couldn’t seem to decide whether to laugh hysterically or crush his Solo cup in his fist. He stalled with a gulp of the saké, never taking his eyes off of Newton, whose own eyes held a challenge, held _I-dare-you_ , held _bring-it-on_.

Hermann screwed up his voice, and the sound that came out was a yelp mixed with vowels and consonants. “I’ll have you know, shit-for-brains, that I _personally_ was on the scene to study Yamarashi’s magnificent shining corpse, and if you’d seen such a vision, you’d have sold far more than your left arm to keep it with you,” and, as an afterthought, “ _dude_.”

Newton lowered the cane, leaned on it, took a step. It was a _great_ lurch, the perfect Hermann lurch. Aditi and Steve’s knowing glance shot back into his mind, and Hermann pushed the thought away. Newton took another step, drew himself up, all one-point-seven-three meters of him, and peered into Hermann’s face. “Take all of your deg _rrr_ ees,” Newton said, loving it, _loving it_ , “and _shove them up your arse_.”

The crowd lost its mind.

Hermann, knowing he was beat, hooked his cane over his other elbow, reached out to shake Newton’s hand, laughing, heat in his cheeks among the cheering small crowd. Newton’s grip was tight, genuine, cackling with the rest of them under that ridiculous hair.

“Damn, dude,” Newton said as the bystanders began to drift away, leaving the four doctors behind, “This is pretty amazing."

"Likewise." Hermann is positively buzzing with warmth, with fondness. "Truly."

"Who did your tats?”

“Aditi and Steve both,” Hermann could not, really could _not_ , get the smile off his face. _I knew it,_ he thought, _the markers have poisoned me._

“Steve fucked up Yamarashi,” Aditi said immediately.

Steve looked aghast. “Engineer, not arteest, god.”

“Oooh, yeah.” Newt reached out, gripped Hermann’s wrist, and turned it over. Hermann jumped, stunned at the sudden contact, stunned more when he decided not to yoink his arm back. “Steve, my man, you blew it. Whatever this is—it just looks like a really pissed-off mouse.”

Steve cuffed him in the back of the head. “Everyone’s a critic.”

“If you guys are done yammering,” said Aditi, “I’d like to dance. There’s a werewolf over there making super suggestive eye-contact and I am not leaving this party alone.”

“Then let's go, let’s dance!” Newt pushed the horrendous spectacles onto his nose, waggled his eyebrows at Hermann.

Hermann sighed, still doing righteous battle in an attempt to stop. Smiling. “No, no, I’ll just find—“

“Nope.” Newt said it, but both he and Aditi took Hermann’s arms. “You are not protesting. I’ve seen you traipse around the lab when Aditi puts on Sinatra.”

“I do not traipse,” he protested, only half-heartedly, but let the lot of them drag him to the floor.

.  
.

At Christmas, Newton gets him a chalkboard as big as a lorry, with three panels and a moveable fourth. “Engineering chipped in,” he says, but he’s red to the tips of his ears when Hermann looks at him with astounded gratitude.

All four panels are covered in chalk dust and equations in two days flat, but Hermann never does get around to erasing the square that says, _For Herms—fuck you for wearing that badass (FAAAKE) Yamarashi tat better than me. Let’s save the world, dude._

_._

_._

_._


End file.
